COLLABORATIVE - Day one.

Day one of the collaborative brief, and after a whole day of filling in sheets, making posters and creating action plans, we all went home with out shiny new creative partners. Me and the lovely Will Asken have paired up after a long time waiting for an opportunity to work together - following the success of our last collaborative exploit.

Even though this partnership was pre-arranged, a day of figuring out 'who we are' and 'what we are looking for' in a creative partner was a useful exercise.

After the session me and Will began to discuss what approach we might take when answering a brief in general. He took notes, and I drew this as we spoke - A visual representation of our individual and collaborative roles within the design process. Obviously with our individual strengths and weaknesses aside, this is a good basis to work from when we compose our official roles tomorrow and sign on the dotted line...

Top 10 - Finished Animation.

It's been a long time coming, but here's the final resolution to this brief. 

I'm really happy with how it turned out. There's still loads and load of tweaking that I could sit and fiddle with for weeks if I had to, but they're things that no one would ever notice anyway! 

I think it's evident in the duration of the video how my confidence within After Effects has grown, and though there is some questionable timing towards the end where it seems a little rushed, as a whole I feel I've gained an amount of technical knowledge that will out weigh any unfavourable aspect this video may contain. I'll sum up my thoughts further in the evaluation to come, but for now - Enjoy!

All comments and thoughts are very welcome.

Top 10 - Animation update

Updated with the last scene changed, much happier with this version - and it was an idea I'd had since the beginning so it's very satisfying to see that come to life. I need to add the final scene, and just a little bit more tweaking before I'll be happy enough to submit this, but for now I'm going to leave it and focus on the more pressing matter of creating the dvd.

Top 10 - Animation update

Another animation update, again just to show you where I'm at. It was incredibly difficult to animate the spade fighting scene with keyframes, but I have learned a huge amount in the process. I feel it could have been executed a lot better, maybe even a stop frame technique would have worked better, maybe even have been funnier!
The last scene here needs changing as well - it's a bodged job and it's obvious. I have a few potential scenes to take it's place though so I'm not too worried about that.
Apart from that I'm happy enough - though the music is starting to get painful to listen to...

Top 10 - Animation update

Just a quick update to show you all where I'm at, there's a lot missing and still a fair amount of tweaking to be done, but I'm pretty happy with where this is going - it's really satisfying to see it all come together.
I've also left the rest of the song playing until the end of the 50 seconds to give you an idea of how the piece will finish, and a sense of how long I have left to fit all the pieces in.
Enjoy.

Top 10 - 'Running' Zombies...

I devoted an entire evening to the movement of the zombie, with rather futile results. I came across many 
problems; the main one being that a natural run is a movement that can be repeated over and over, 
where as the movement of a zombie is pretty erratic, and there would have to be pauses between steps... 
making it very difficult to just drop him into a composition as I please.
Anyway, here are my try outs... I laughed, I cried, I gave up.
Time for plan B.

Top 10 - FINAL CRIT

First 10 seconds of the 50 second long title sequence.
There's still a few bits that need tweaking at the beginning and toward the end, but you get the idea.





Dvd menu graphics.
I intend to embed a looping video in the blank grey square, and animate all the transitions similarly to the video above. The aim is to make it look like it contains a lot of information, giving a feeling of disorientation as you move through the interface, but retaining a clear selection of choices for the viewer to make amongst the mess. I'd like to make this look a little more hi-tech than the video, almost like navigating through a secret government file - Dvd lends itself to this kind of style quite nicely given it's interactive nature.

What needs to be done..
- I need to digitalise the paper work I have done so far.
- I need to produce a schematic.
- I need to animate the dvd transitions.
- I need to complete the 50 second animation and dvd interface.

TOP 10 - Animations

Audio: Zombina and the Skeletones - Nobody likes you when you're dead
Myspace

Top 10 - Colour Choices

Still toying with the idea of having a colour transition between yellow, orange and red through the duration of the animation, but to ease the progression (which has been rather slow) I'm going to stick with orange for now.